Chasing the North Star

by Robert Morgan

  About the time the second policeman finished up, I heard voices outside. The first policeman dashed outside, and I heard more talking. The second man finished putting on his clothes, and the first ran back inside and hissed, “Get her out of here!”

  “Put on your clothes,” the second man said to me. And I slipped on my dress and drawers and put on my shoes. He pushed me out of the cell and they marched me to a little side door.

  “Get away from here, you big heifer,” one said, and they shoved me out into the cold where the ground was wet and wind slapped my face. A little side street ran behind the jail, and I followed that into the middle of town. A dog barked behind a store and a train whistle ripped the air. I was wondering which way Jonah and that man in the wagon had gone. I was glad I still had the dollars from Miss Linda’s in my pocket, but when I reached into my dress I found the coins gone. The money must have fallen out when I crawled out from under the train, or when I took the dress off in the jail. There was nothing in my pocket but lint. The policeman must have taken the coins. And the policemen had the pillowcase full of my things.

  I walked down the street past stores, and houses with smoke coming out of chimneys. I was lucky to be free, but had no place to lay my head. I walked toward the train station and the river, because I wanted to see the place where Jonah got up on the wagon. That seemed the only place to go. Behind a store somebody had thrown out a loaf of bread. It was dirty and had been pecked by something, but I brushed the ashes and dust off and ate it anyway. A few ashes don’t hurt when you’re hungry.

  Eating the bread, I found the spot where I thought Jonah climbed onto the wagon. I followed the direction the wagon went and came to a road that ran along the bank of the river. The wagon must have gone that way, I guessed, and followed the road to the edge of town where there were no more houses. Now the road split there and one fork went off to the right and one ran on up the river. There was no way to tell which road that man on the wagon had taken. I stopped there shivering and studied which way to go.

  The road up the river wound into the dark mountains, and I chose that way. The ridges looked like they’d been painted with blue and purple, and the river thrashed over rocks way down below. I followed the road over hills and past several farms and came to this rock house with a big barn behind it, and orchards all around it. There were several women standing in the yard and the man with the wide-brim hat I’d seen on the wagon before was bending over somebody on the ground. I stepped behind an apple tree and watched and saw it was Jonah.

  I started to run into the yard but stopped myself, because I didn’t know what had happened or who the people were. Maybe they had killed Jonah, and would kill me, too. I knelt behind a hedge at the side of the yard and watched.

  “Wake up,” the man said and slapped Jonah’s cheek. Jonah was all wet and covered with mud. Buckets and ropes lay around him on the grass, beside the well. “Wake up,” the man said. The women stood there like they didn’t know what to do. The farmer looked in Jonah’s pockets and looked in the kettle that sat on the grass.

  “He got some gas,” the farmer said. And then Jonah started to rouse himself. He woke up and flung his arm out and kicked his foot. Then he rolled over and tried to get up.

  “Take your time, my lad,” the farmer said.

  Jonah looked like he was still half asleep. There was mud on his face like the clay he had painted himself with when we were on the French Broad River. I breathed out relief, seeing Jonah was trying to get up.

  Sixteen

  Jonah

  Jonah knew that if Mr. Driver was planning to inform the sheriff and have him arrested, he might not wait until daylight. As Jonah thought about the danger, he knew it was better to leave before the morning. He added wood to the fire to make the toolroom brighter. Anyone watching might think he was there, as long as there was light in the window. He put on his wet shoes and slipped his wet coat over Mr. Driver’s clean clothes. The long underwear was warmer than anything he’d ever worn. Jonah took the scythe down from its pegs. Its snath was curved and tapered, the handles smooth and firm. He saw a whetstone on the bench under the scythe and slipped that into his pocket. He placed the damp map in his shirt pocket, and slung the kettle on its rope over his shoulder.

  There were two doors out of the toolroom, and he left through the door into the barn hallway, holding the scythe near the head with the blade down. Horses and cows stirred in the stalls. His eyes were used to the firelight and he felt his way along the corridor to the outside, trying to recall the yard of the farmhouse, where the well was, the chicken house, the road. A window near the front of the house showed a light.

  Jonah paused to let his eyes adjust to the dark. There was no starlight, and away from the window he saw only shadows, shades of blackness. He listened for the sounds of someone outside the house. Could men be waiting for him behind the hedge? A horse snorted in the barn. A fox barked way off in the woods. Jonah eased his way past the well and the woodshed along the edge of the yard to the road. It would have been a wonderful joy to sleep all night in a warm place. He’d slept little the night before on the train. Mr. Driver would expect Jonah to sleep soundly after the ordeal in the well, after his large meal.

  Once he reached the road Jonah found he could tell where the road ran by looking to the left and then to the right. The brush and trees along the way appeared darker than the road itself. If he glanced out of the corner of his eye, he could tell where the tracks ran ahead. Jonah shivered and pulled his hat down firmly on his forehead.

  “Where you going with that thing?” a voice said. Jonah whirled around, sure he’d been caught by Mr. Driver or the sheriff. There was no way to explain why he’d taken a scythe out into the night. He wondered if he could run into the woods before they caught him.

  “You gone cut somebody’s head off?” the voice said, and a chuckle that followed told him it was Angel.

  “How’d you get here?”

  “Never you mind how I got here,” Angel said. “You run off and left me again.”

  “Had no choice.”

  “Let’s go,” Angel said. “You gone carry that mowing blade?”

  The inspiration Jonah had in the barn about the scythe was that if a Negro was seen walking along the road with a mowing blade over his shoulder, almost no one would think he was a runaway. Most would assume he was a farmhand, a hired Negro on the way to another job or coming back from a job. It wouldn’t occur to anyone that an escaped slave would sally forth along the road in broad daylight with a scythe and a kettle.

  Jonah had laughed to think that the devil was supposed to carry a scythe, or maybe it was Death, the grim reaper. He liked to think that he stalked the road like a figure of death. Boys and bullies might leave him alone because he carried the fine-balanced scythe. One swing of the blade could cut a man’s head off, or the head of a mad dog. With the scythe he might fend off a charging bull or a bear. He might not have gotten away with carrying a scythe along a road in the Carolinas or Virginia. But in the North, in Pennsylvania, it just might work.

  He explained his plan to Angel. “We walk as far as we can before daylight,” he said.

  “Wouldn’t have thought of that myself,” Angel said.

  “Don’t you ride my ass,” Jonah said.

  “Bet you want to ride my ass,” Angel said. Jonah felt his face get hot.

  Before daylight Jonah and Angel climbed into a hay barn and buried themselves in straw. Angel did not come near him, but soon dropped into a fast sleep, like someone worn out, who hadn’t slept in days. Jonah lay awake for a while. With the scythe beside him, he felt like a soldier with his sword, or a shepherd with his staff. The scythe gave him a new kind of authority. It was an instrument of power and safety.

  Jonah woke around noon and heard voices in the yard in front of the barn. Angel was still asleep, almost covered in hay. He looked out the left window and saw a man and two boys digging into a manure pile with pitchforks and loading the manure onto a wagon. As
soon as the wagon was loaded, the man giddyupped the horse and held the reins while the boys followed, carrying the pitchforks. The wagon bumped and creaked out toward a distant field, and soon as they were out of sight, Jonah shook Angel awake. “Time to go, big girl,” he said.

  Angel rolled over and held out a knife pointed at him. He’d not seen the knife before, a small, thin butcher knife. “What are you doing with that?” he said.

  Angel saw it was him standing over her in the gloom of the barn loft. She put the knife away somewhere in her dress. “Surprised you didn’t leave me asleep,” she said.

  “I was afraid you’d follow me.”

  Jonah hurried down the ladder with his scythe and Angel followed, her weight making the ladder creak. He paused to be sure nobody else was in the barnyard, then walked with the scythe and kettle over his shoulder past the opened manure pile to the road, Angel close beside him.

  The road was his safety. It might be wet and muddy, puddled in places and rocky in others, but the road was the most neutral ground. In the road he was not trespassing, but just a Negro carrying a tool to another job somewhere farther on. The road was his refuge, if there was any refuge, until he got to Canada. The road was a kind of story he was reading, or telling, step by step and minute by minute, long as a novel. When he got to the end of the story, he would be in chains, or dead, or free in Canada.

  “We’ll try to look like people going somewhere to work,” Jonah said.

  “You look silly carrying that thing,” Angel said.

  “This thing will throw off suspicion,” Jonah said.

  “Ain’t you got it all figured out,” Angel said.

  “I figured out some things,” Jonah said.

  As they walked through the thick welts of mud, Jonah thought how, though Mr. Driver had not given him the dollar, he’d provided the long underwear and clothes, which were worth more than a dollar, and the scythe and whetstone were more valuable still. The value of the mowing blade was proved to him the first time he passed through a village along the river.

  It was just a little hamlet dominated by a white steeple. As he crossed a hill he saw another steeple farther on. The street ran near the river, but the churches were set back from the main street, and the graveyard was on still higher ground. That was something Jonah had noticed before. Almost all graveyards were placed on higher ground, often on a hilltop, as if the dead preferred a place with a view. But he remembered the coffins washed out by the flood on the Shenandoah River. As they walked past the store, men noticed them. Jonah took off his hat and wished them a good day. With the scythe on his shoulder, he hoped to look like a Negro laborer going from the south side of the village to somewhere on the north side. He hoped Angel might look like someone on her way to do domestic work. Her fine dress was now dirty and torn in two or three places. No one accosted them. They stepped out of the way of two ladies walking by on a plank sidewalk. They passed a small brick courthouse.

  A man wearing a blue uniform stepped out of a gate near the courthouse. He wore a black hat and had a pistol in a holster on his belt. He had a long black mustache and stared at Jonah and Angel approaching. Raw fear washed through Jonah’s guts. Whoa now, he whispered to himself. He’d have to act like he knew where he was going.

  “Good day, sir,” Jonah said to the constable and lifted his hat.

  “Humph,” the man in the uniform muttered.

  Jonah thought of asking him a question, such as where was the Smith farm, or where could a man get a good meal. But he decided the less he said, the better his chances would be. A black man who knew where he was and where he was going wouldn’t ask such questions. Two laborers returning from work would not be lost. As Jonah walked on he felt the law man watching him. He expected any second to hear, “Boy, where you going?” A wagon approached and he and Angel stepped aside to let it pass. The constable never called out to him. The scythe was like a shield. No one wanted to bother a Negro carrying a mowing blade. They assumed anyone toting a scythe was going about his own business. And maybe having a woman along was not such a bad idea either.

  IT TOOK JONAH AND Angel four days to reach Williamsport, which was almost halfway to Elmira. The mountains were long and low and dark, and he felt they were traveling through a shadow land. They slept in barns and lived on eggs stolen from henhouses. They stopped at a store and bought matches with a penny he found in the road, and he used the kettle as a cooking pot. Boiled eggs were nourishing, and two or three each would fill them up. Boiled eggs helped keep him warm.

  They found the best time to steal eggs was just before daylight, when rooster and hens were already stirring, clucking and crowing. If he moved slowly he could take two or three eggs from the nests and not disturb the hens. He was learning the ways of the road. With the old kettle and a few matches and Angel helping, he could go a long way.

  The long running ridges of northern Pennsylvania looked like prison walls. But the road followed the river, and the river found its way through gaps and gorges. The river cut through ridges that ran on like a dull-toothed saw. The river came out of the north and they walked contrary to the river and with the river at the same time.

  One day, as Jonah and Angel followed the road through a long stretch of woods beside the river, he saw a dog ahead. They’d encountered many dogs, sometimes in packs, sometimes alone. Out in the woods, away from its owner’s house, a dog almost always ran from them. Sometimes a dog would follow from a distance, looking for a handout or companionship or adventure, before disappearing again. But this gray dog watched them approach and did not run away. It stood in the ruts ahead as though studying them, and its tail didn’t wag. Jonah whistled as he got closer, to show he was neither scared nor angry. The dog stepped sideways, but continued to stare, its head lowered and tilted to the side. At first it seemed the dog had something in its mouth, a gray animal or a rag. But as Jonah got closer he saw it was foam hanging from both sides of the mouth. And then he noticed the eyes, a little bloodshot and fevered, glazed over like they couldn’t really see anything. When the dog took a step, it staggered as if it was drunk.

  “That’s a mad dog,” Jonah said. Angel screamed and backed away.

  Slow there, old boy, Jonah whispered to himself, for he saw the dog was truly mad. Slobber hung like an awful beard from its mouth. But it was too late for him to stop and turn around; he was almost even with the dog. He’d not been suspicious because he thought dogs could only be rabid in hot weather, in dog days, but this dog was clearly mad on this chill autumn day. Jonah thought if he just kept walking with the scythe and kettle and Angel beside him, the dog might not bother him. Its eyes were red as a demon’s in a nightmare, but they seemed not to see anything. Maybe they could walk quietly by and the afflicted dog wouldn’t even locate them. Its brain might be so fevered it couldn’t decide what it heard or saw or smelled. Please, Lord, Jonah prayed for the first time in many days, let me get beyond this dog possessed by evil spirits. He took one step, and then another, and another, and Angel walked beside him, and they were almost on the far side of the dog when the animal lurched their way. Jonah knew it was dangerous to run from any dog. Better to act calm and unafraid and try not to excite the cur.

  But as he stepped forward on the ruts, not hastening his pace, the sick dog lunged and almost fell, recovered its balance, and then bit down on his leg. Jonah felt the teeth through the heavy jean cloth of his pants, but the dog was too weak to bite hard. Angel screamed and ran into the woods. Jonah jerked away, tearing the fabric out of the dog’s mouth. He hit the dog on the head with the butt end of the scythe, and the animal fell on the ground and began jerking.

  Jonah started running, but looked over his shoulder and saw the dog wallowing in a fit in the ruts. He ran even harder, but when he looked back again he found the dog had stumbled to its feet and was following him. The mad dog ran sideways, this way and that way. But it was gaining on him. Jonah ran harder, clutching the scythe and kettle, and just before the dog reached him, he came to
a little stream that splashed over rocks across the road.

  Jonah dashed through the water to the other side, and then looked back. The dog had stopped at the stream’s edge and fallen down, quivering in another fit. He’d heard that mad dogs wouldn’t cross water. The dog jerked and groaned beside the stream, foam covering its mouth and nose. Jonah knew he had a duty to kill the mad dog. Otherwise it would attack somebody else. It might bite a child, or an old person. It would bite other dogs and animals and pass on its madness. He set the kettle down at the edge of the road. Stepping back into the water, he approached the writhing animal as it groveled in mud and sand. Raising the scythe as though it was a plunger, he drove the butt end down on the dog’s head. He pounded again and again until blood seeped out over the ears and jaws and the dog twitched and lay still.

  With the blade Jonah pushed the body into brush at the side of the road, and then he washed the mowing blade in the stream, scouring away any blood or fur or slobber. He’d heard you could catch rabies from the spit of a mad dog. Only after the scythe was clean did Jonah look at his pants. There were tooth marks in the cloth, but the fabric had not been cut through. He pulled his trouser leg up, and the long underwear, and saw the skin on his shin had not been broken. With relief he rubbed his hands with sand and washed them in the cold creek water.

  Angel stepped out of the woods and looked at his leg. “You got bit,” she said.

  “Didn’t break the skin,” Jonah said.

  “You ain’t going to be mad?” Angel said.

  “No more than usual,” Jonah said.

  As they continued along the muddy, rocky road, Angel took care to step around the puddles. Her dress had mud along the hem, and was torn at the waist. “I’d be clean and wearing silk had I stayed at Miss Linda’s,” she said.